ragged blog

Smileys piss me off.

Yes, thats profanity, and justified in my opinion. Smileys are an awful idea.

No, I’m not talking about the ASCII art derivatives like :-) and it’s various facial expressions; I am talking about (1),(2),(3)…(6)….(a)….(z)…(@)…

Whats the problem with them? Well the problem is several things, and whats worst is that no one seems to put a morsel of brain power into fixing the monstrosity.

OK, so you now think I’m insane. Complaining about smileys, I must be some kind of git.

No, not really.

You see, in most computer protocols, and indeed human protocols there is some requirement for pre-sharing of information which defines the way in which information is to be passed over some medium. Normally this means that if we want to speak to someone, we need to speak a language they can understand, otherwise we just get confusion or loss of information.

Well smileys are not in anyway ‘agreed’. There is no formal definition for what (6) means. Do you know? Apparently it’s: “[11:58] J: should be a red smiley with devil wings and a demonic laugh”. Right, okay.

Now the thing that really upsets me is when I am trying to talk to someone about some source code. Source code is full of parentheses. Full of them. What happens to parentheses in most messaging applications - they take your typing, convert it to some meaningless set of over-sized over-rated bitmap symbols and make it look real nasty.

No more smileys for me, I run Trillian and have disabled them. I have this problem now though, that people are still sending me smileys and expecting them to mean something. There is a fundamental failing of feature support here. I can’t really live without them, and I most certainly cant live with them.

The power of plugins will help. As soon as I have time, I am going to develop a plugin which provides me with a “smiley translator” built right into my app. That’ll sort the problem out somewhat, but it doesn’t solve the design issue. The design issue being that these NON HUMAN LANGUAGE entities are being sent IN HUMAN LANGUAGE in UN-ESCAPED strings. If the strings were escaped there would be no issue. What about escaping smiley data in /me strings with /me [smileys_to_follow] (2, 7), (3, 8) etc. Where the second number inside the bracket is the position the smiley should be displayed in the message? And thats just a plain simple way of achieving a better result!

I really can’t see how programmers can make such a great flurry over something so simple as a textually serialised protocol. Why cant they design it properly? Why cant they make it work reliably? Why cant they build backup servers so the service doesn’t go down for hours at a time? Do they ever see any QA? Why is the video and voice support so crappy? (when applications like ventrilo are so relatively easy to build).

So you see, MSN isn’t the greatest thing on the planet, and AOL really isn’t any better or worse. IRC is (generally) better handled, but thats only because enough geeks have become upset with their interfaces over the years. Of course, you only have to get close to an EFnet server to see why IRC is not really any better.

We need better mediums, but none of us cheap asses will pay for it, and thats why nothing new is really succeeding. If you really want proper Internet chatting, your either going to have to persuade a geek that it needs fixing, or start paying. Of course most paid services dont link to the free ones, so it’s kinda like having a phone connected to a phone company with no other subscribers and no inter-phone company links.

Forget smileys. At the moment, they are destructive, and may not mean to the other end what they mean to you.